To be honest, I didn’t notice it at first. They shadow the bright red petunias and purple coleus planted in the lawn of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden. Cockscomb, cockscomb “Dracula” for the first time when I crouched down to read the label on the velvety red flower. I noticed a knee-length black vulture in cast foam sitting still next to it. I looked it up and found that there are dozens more. The garden was full of them.
They were installed by a Jamaican-born mixed media artist Ebony G. Patterson for her show “…things get to flourish…in the molt…in the molt.” The culmination of many intermittent stays in the garden and its library, this exhibition also includes works installed on several floors of the garden library, but it cuts deepest. is a vulture.
There are four types of them: standing, turning, browsing, and thrusting forward. Strictly speaking, there are several different colors.
They all look more or less black, especially when seen in groups. But the glitter, the whitish layer of dirt, and their precise placement in the light and shadow of the flowers give each one a subtly different color effect. Some people get by in charcoal gray, while others have a flashy and unmistakable purple back. At the same time, they are a kind of variation, each constituting an independent world yet gracefully giving substance and depth to the flowers that stand within it.
Patterson, 42, lives and works between Kingston, Jamaica and Chicago, and teaches and exhibits extensively in the United States.For wall labels and exhibition materials, She raises the concept of the garden as a place of healing and regeneration in general, but at the same time the legacy of slavery and colonialism, both in the plants removed from their native habitat and in the labor that goes with it. I also think of it as a special place. She also talks about vultures as custodians, an integral part of the natural world, including death, decay and extinction. (We don’t think much about scavengers, but once you realize they’re everywhere.)
Outside the conservatory, all these ideas have a surprising expanse. Whether standing alone or in lively groups of up to 30 people, seemingly having a discussion, vultures seem to inhabit spaces unnoticed by humans. They draw your own gaze downward as well, forcing you to think of the flowerbed not just as a careful symphony of shapes and colors, but as a raucous crowd of people.
Inside the greenhouse, where Patterson also installed cast glass leaves and body parts, the atmosphere was even colder. A severed leg protruding above a potted petunia is a reminder of slavery and colonial violence. The ghostly white plant morphology, modeled after an extinct species, could mean race, climate change, or the insatiable emptiness of the information age.
But no matter what details you read, the triumph of this piece is how Patterson’s art enhances the botanical display. An exhibit of Home Depot-purchasable petunias and begonias (a type of tropical plant made available in New York by cargo planes and capitalism) adds to Patterson’s lost seeds and glass feet to bring history to life. acquire a social background or moral basis. I can’t help but think about the great forces that make botanical gardens possible. But adding colors and textures makes flowers even more beautiful. (As Patterson himself said at the beginning of the show, “There can be beauty in ugliness.”)
Patterson’s understated but thoughtful approach to facility resources continues today. Luester T. Merz Library. Three-channel video portraits of pristine gardens and intricate paper collages alternate with historical displays of endangered collections containing numerous dried specimens. Along with Patterson’s installations and collages, historical materials inevitably appear colorless. But that only adds to the compelling atmosphere of tragedy.
On the top floor stands the library’s most powerful single work, “…Festa…”. This is a free-standing 10-foot wall covered on one side with a thick fold of tapestry encrusted with tassels, beads, more glass plant shapes, and various glass plant shapes. It has golden plastic vertebrae, and hundreds of red gloves on the other. Paired with tropical patterned wallpaper and a vulture perched on the ceiling, “… fester …” implies luxury and decay, excess and restraint, beauty and ugliness, all of which are proudly anchored. I refuse.
That said, I don’t think it’s entirely correct to parse the program piece by piece. It was most successful as an overall installation, a complex but idiosyncratic reaction to Patterson’s discovery of the New York Botanical Garden.
…things get to flourish…in the molt…in the molt…
through September 17, New York Botanical Garden, 2900 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY, 718-817-8700. nybg.org.
